MTA data reveals how NYC's hottest subway cars bake 1 train riders

The MTA has a hard time keeping its riders cool in the summer — especially on the subway’s 1 train.

The line, which runs local from the Battery to the North Bronx, has received far more complaints from riders about busted air conditioners than any subway route over the last five years, according to data obtained by Gothamist through a Freedom of Information request.

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Help us hunt for train car 2449

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• MTA data shows car 2449 on the 1 line received the most complaints about broken air conditioning of any train car in the subway system.
• The numbers of train cars appear at both ends of the exterior of the car, as well as inside the car near the emergency brake.
• Gothamist reporter Ramsey Khalifeh searched in vain for this car for days.
• If you spot the car, please snap a picture, check if the AC is working and email [email protected].

From 2020 through mid-July last year, riders complained 2,934 times about hot cars with faulty or broken cooling systems on the 1 line. The 6 line ranked a distant second, with 1,152 complaints. The 3 line, appropriately, ranked third with 906 complaints over the period. The data also revealed exactly the city’s “hottest” subway car, or the one that received the most individual complaints.

Each of the three hottest lines rely on some of the MTA’s oldest subway cars — called R62s — which date back to the 1980s, when subway air conditioning was a relatively new marvel that wasn’t available on every line. The data highlights how riders physically feel the effects of those aging trains, through not just a clunkier commute, but also a sweatier one.

The MTA plans to replace all those aging train cars in the coming years through its new capital plan, but riders are stuck with unreliable cooling systems in the meantime.

“They just need to fix it,” said 1 train rider Joshua Perez, who was sitting in a hot car during last week’s heat wave. “Especially because it’s summer now. You can’t get out the hot and come in the hot. It don’t work like that.”

The MTA data shows 285 cars were removed from service for broken air conditioners from 2020 through last July, and 108 of them were the model used on the 1, 3 and 6 lines. But complaints about hot cars from riders still persisted even as the cars were removed, showing how the MTA struggles to fix faulty air conditioners as fast as they break down.

Bill Amarosa Jr., NYC Transit's senior vice president of subways, said complaints began to drop late last summer — and noted it’s still incredibly rare to board a steamy subway car.

“With 1.2 billion trips over hundreds of millions of miles last year, fewer than one in every half-million riders reported a warm subway car, and some of those came contemporaneously about the same car,” Amarosa said in a statement. “There’s a reason complaints dropped 21% last year from the year before—subway air conditioners are regularly checked and when they fail, usually on a decades-old car, they get fixed.”

The data supports Amarosa’s argument that many of the complaints are about the same subway cars — but it also shows every car that received more than 30 complaints since 2020 were on the 1 line.

The worst of those was car number 2449, which received 62 complaints for non-functioning air conditioning over the period surveyed in the data, suggesting it’s the steamiest subway car in the city.

Gothamist observed two different 1 train cars that reached temperatures between 92 and 93 degrees during last month’s heat wave. Both were in service without functioning AC’s, but neither were reflected in the MTA data for having a high number of hot car complaints.

Riders in the cars were quick to notice the uncomfortable temperature.

“Today there’s no air conditioning on this car, but that’s not unusual,” said Tribeca commuter Vincent Dipilato. “I’ve been in the city for 74 years and the train system hasn’t worked as we would like it.”

He said he was still “surprised” to hear that the 1 train ranked the worst in terms of heat complaints, even though he’s a regular on the line.

The air-conditioning problem on 1 trains is well-known to subway car mechanics, who have previously told Gothamist the design of the air conditioning units used on the line is antiquated and prone to breakdowns.

The mechanics are also forced to work on 1 trains at the MTA’s 240th Street train yard in the Bronx, which has cramped and crumbling infrastructure that workers say strains their productivity.

The MTA plans to overhaul the yard through the same capital plan that’s funding the purchase of new subway cars for the 1 line.